Help: SYSTEM Table Space Not Being Released

Hi,

I'm having the problem that Oracle is continually running out of SYSTEM table space. It occurs with all of the several independent Oracle installations that we have at our site. It looks like Oracle is not releasing any SYSTEM table space when we delete users.

For example:

Amount of free SYSTEM table space at start: 500K

Perform the following actions:

• create user account
• create tables and populate with data in user account
• drop user account cascade

Amount of free SYSTEM table space at end: 400K

As a result we lose 100K of SYSTEM table space every time we run through this cycle. It looks like the SYSTEM table space is never being freed because there is never any fragmentation of the SYSTEM table space. We have checked for objects in the system that do not belong to any valid users and not found any. We have phoned Oracle and they do not have any answers. We're running Oracle 7 server release 7.0.16.4.0 on HP/UX machines.

Any suggestions, comments or help greatly appreciated.

-- 
Tim Roy - roy_at_mda.ca		MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates
				13800 Commerce Parkway
Phone: 	(604)231-2429		Richmond, B.C., Canada
Fax:	(604)278-2533		V6V 2J3